It’s no fun to take Camille Paglia seriously. Not rewarding.
It could be the effort is, as someone remarked similarly about Slavoj Zizek, a
category error. But in thinking about the opening pages of Paglia’s new book,
it occurs to me that there is a simple way of describing her. Her
pronouncements about art, literature and assorted other topics over the course
of her career (including, back in her heyday, when she regularly mounted a salon.com soapbox,
strictures about how Madonna should sing and Hillary Clinton dress) have this
in common: behind them there is a demagogue trying to get out.

Camille Paglia needs to rule. Only her dictates can save us
from all that is eating away at civilization as she insists that we know it.
Only she can defeat the feminists she despises (as opposed to one or two she
spares); only she can rescue literature from literary theory (she pronounces
“LacanFoucaultDerrida” as if it were one dirty word, the name of a Francophone
tumor preying on the American mind).

In the new book she wants to rescue us from the “vertigo” of
digital distraction and social media. She complains in her introduction that
“the genre of painting has lost its primacy and authority.” For this she blames
the “tragic complacency” of the curators and directors of major art
institutions. She will cut through that exhausted curatoriat and help, indeed,
force us, “to relearn how to see.”

It doesn’t give Paglia a second’s pause that perhaps
painting, along with sculpture, has lost its traditional role not because the
likes of Phillip Montebello, for example, ex-director of the Metropolitan
Museum, was a slacker or a dolt — he presided, among other things, over the
creation of a superb Greco-Roman gallery, though of course Paglia herself would
have done better — but because other visual arts, from the beginning of the
twentieth century on, have come into being. Photography, film, television and
now an overflow of digital possibilities all lay claim to talent and attention.

Her response to complexity is simple: rave. Not to rave is
not to care. So she raves about the turn from painting to other media — what
the despised postmodernists of Paris might have helpfully called the decenteredness
of painting. Had she read and absorbed Marshal Mcluhan she might be less
shocked yes shocked that the electronic age has provided so much competition to
the paintbrush and the pedestal.

Had she read and absorbed Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art
in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), she might appreciate that media
transitions are not doomed to be zero sum. According to Benjamin, yes,
something precious is lost when a painting is stripped, by reproduction, of
what he called its “aura”, its one-of-a-kind, almost human presence in space
and time. But something no less valuable is gained when, by dint of the same
technological revolution, film reveals motion as never seen before. Benjamin
compares the painter to a magician and the cameraman to a surgeon and does not
feel compelled to choose between their arts. His thoughts on this subject
remain enchanting and substantial. Both Mcluhan and Benjamin were moved to
reflect deeply about new media, as, too, was Plato, when, in the Phaedrus, he wondered
about the harm that would be caused to an oral tradition by the new medium of
alphabetic text.

These thinkers left plenty to think about. They did not just
rave.

***

I had the unpleasant experience of interviewing Camille
Paglia in 1995. In preparation for an interview I try to immerse myself as
fully as I can in the subject’s work. Most people like talking about their work
with an informed, sympathetic, not necessarily uncritical interlocutor. Not
Camille Paglia. I can’t help but chuckle, at this remove, when I think of her
summarily saying: “Stop talking to me. It gives me a headache. Just ask
questions. I give answers.”

I felt insulted, almost walked off and left her with her
headache, but heeled. The results were instructive.

Paglia told me she had been inspired by psychedelics and
psychedelic culture, and liked to call her style of writing “psychedelic
criticism” since there was a lot of “reverb” in it, just like in “acid rock.”
She affirmed that she herself had never had a psychedelic experience, had
never, in brief, tripped. She nevertheless felt entitled to speak for
psychedelic experience — that “revolutionary, hallucinatory, and mystic way of
seeing” — better than those who had indulged, better, by far, she opined, than
Grateful Dead fans parading around in their “tie-died tee-shirts”. For Paglia,
a contact high — but not from Deadheads — was all the revelation she needed.

She confirmed, as well, that she had never participated in
sadomasochistic sex. Still, to my mind, the best bit in her diffuse Sexual
Personae was the chapter on Rousseau, in which she managed to correlate his sex
life (as expressed in his Confessions) to his politics. As a boy Jean-Jacques
was regularly draped over the lap of his lovely governess for spankings he came
to relish. As an adult, he saw women as potential spankers and himself as an
aspiring spankee. Rousseau is best known for writing: “Man is born free, and
everywhere he is in chains”. But in his sexual fantasies he kept some chains
around. Paglia, to be sure, had no firsthand experience of this type to draw
on. What she owes to Jean-Jacques is her eye-opening contact spank.

Something of the same approach — a curious bifurcation
hovering between disingenuousness and hypocrisy — marks Glittering Images. “The
arts are fighting a rearguard action,” she writes, “their very survival at
stake.” The minds of children are especially at risk, and demand “rescue from
the torrential stream of flickering images, which addict them to seductive
distractions.”

How peculiar then — how typically Paglia — that this book,
which is meant to be a sort of primer on art history, and to serve as an
example for grade school curricula, concludes with a prolonged gush of
enthusiasm for George Lucas’s Revenge of the Sith (2005). Paglia has no end of
praise for this, the sixth and most digital entry in the Star Wars saga, in
which, as she sees it, George Lucas “closed the gap between art and technology”

It somehow doesn’t bother her that the movie is embedded
completely, as she notes, in “the gargantuan cosmos of Star Wars cartoons,
video games, novels, handbooks, action figures, plastic kits, and Web sites.”
Nor that it makes a substantial contribution to the “torrential stream of
flickering images” that can disturb and derange young minds.

The tale is told that Alec Guinness, aka Obi-Wan Kenobi,
once agreed to give an autograph to a young fan only on condition that the
child gave up watching Star Wars. Obsessive viewing was the hypnotic dark side
of the force. Other things — books, paintings, films — deserved attention.

Paglia herself was apparently never visited by Obi-Wan in
his shimmering ghostly form to caution her against ending a book on the history
of art with Star Wars. Would she have listened? Probably not. For her, art
history, which began millennia ago, as per Glittering Images, in Pharaonic
Egypt, ends in our time with the $135 million Revenge of the Sith.

If you try to take Camille Paglia seriously, despite the
occasional insight you might find along the way, in the end it’s impossible to
avoid the suspicion that you’ve made a category error.

***

“This book,” she says about Glittering Images, “was
motivated by my dismay at the open animosity toward art and artists that I have
heard on American AM talk radio over the past two decades.” Longtime Paglia
readers can confirm that she is an avid listener to AM talk radio. A 1999 column she wrote for
salon.com hinged on the following: “Within 24 hours of the opening of the present
show, local radio talk shows in New York and Philadelphia were seething with
allegations about the Jewish presence on the Brooklyn Museum’s board and
administration.”

The show in question to was the second at the Brooklyn
Museum to arouse furor, including threats by then Mayor Rudolf Giuliani to
defund the borough's popular museum. The piece most offensive to Paglia, the
Mayor and AM talk radio callers, was “The Holy Virgin Mary”, by
Nigerian/British painter Chris Ofili.

This was a dark-skinned Madonna, on a canvas that included
floating images of female genitalia. Some people seethed to find the Virgin in
dark-toned, Nubian featured, non-virginal contexts. This can’t but bring to
mind how often Muslims seethe when they detect what they take to be off-color
representations of Muhammad. One reason not to push this analogy too far,
though, is that Ofili, unlike the hacks behind the current, stupidly offensive,
anti-Muslim video, is, in fact a talented artist, who was not out to insult
Mary, though that would be well within his rights, so much as to Africanize and
sexualize her. Ofili used cakes of varnished elephant dung as stands for the
canvas. Elephant dung can have positive connotations in African contexts. But
try explaining that on New York/Philadelphia AM Talk Radio.

Did Paglia try? Can you imagine her calling in to reason
with the seething? No, when she turned on the radio she enjoyed a contact
seethe, and wrote a column
that debuted under the inflammatory title: “Why are a Jewish collector and a
Jewish museum director promoting anti-Catholic art?” This was Paglia’s inner
demagogue unleashed at its most vulgar — and unforgiveable.

As for the extinction event Paglia feels is threatening art,
and that Glittering Images was written to forestall, it’s worth noting that as
of this writing MoMA is proposing to stay open seven days a week instead of six
in order to accommodate a crush of visitors whose number has doubled in the
last eight years. We have multiple choices, then. There are museums and
galleries which seem, contra Paglia, to be thriving. Or you can go along with
the flow of AM talk radio, never daring to contradict. Or you can download
Revenge of the Sith, ignore Alec Guinness’s admonition, and follow along yet
again as Anakin Skywalker completes his journey to the dark side.

You can even do all three.

** from Karen Bridson

I have so ached for someone to write something thoughtful
and compelling that is critical of Camille Paglia. This is because a good ten
percent of what she says and writes I find so over-the-top that I don’t want to
believe her. Yet I feel compelled to accept what she says because, like the
other 90 percent of what she says, makes so much bloody sense. She is a
Herculean academic whose ideas seem to finally stitch the world together for
me. But I want someone with chops as great as hers to try to knock her down so
that I don’t just full stop take what she says as fact. But this ‘review’ seems
like romper room compared to the level of polemic Paglia engages in. The
philosophic connections you draw make no sense and it seems as though you
simply took this chance to grind your axe with her. Disappointing.

** from Ryan

You are so completely off the mark with this review. I would
suggest you stop trying to wrestle with Paglia’s ideas since it is obvious you
don’t know what you’re talking about. Anti-Semitism?! Paglia has written at
length about her admiration of Jews and their influence on her intellectual
development. Your accusation is insulting. And do you really think Paglia
forgot to read McLuhan? Again, she has referenced McLuhan many times in her
work. Like the above commenter said, you are woefully unprepared to mount any
intellectual challenge to Paglia.

**

yes, she writes about jewish intellectual achievements. then
she posts an inflammatory piece of garbage entitled: "why are a jewish
collector and a jewish museum director promoting anti-catholic art?” on the one
hand, oft-repeated reverence for harold bloom, and on the other, gutter
antisemitism. sorry you can't see it. i called her bifurcated. and so, to put
mildly, she is. (for a fuller treatment of her reviews of the sensation shows,
neither of which, astoundingly, she actually bothered to attend, see the
american prospect, http://prospect.org/article/oops-she-did-it-again).

same with mcluhan: sure she read him. but when it comes to
thinking about why painting is not the center of visual art it's as if she
never has. better to rage against museum directors and damn the art world in
her inimitable soapbox style.

i said, in my response to karen bridson, what i once found
valuable about paglia.

it's interesting that neither bridson, who professed to find
paglia "herculean", nor you, have done as much. you prefer, after the
manner of paglia herself, to rage and insult. perhaps it's just paglia's never
less than enragée style that you find compelling about her.

** from ryan

In discussing the Sensation show and the Ofili painting, she
was making a general observation of how it is considered “cool” and “hip” in
the art world to poke fun at or denigrate Christian iconography. This may be
one of the reasons, she thinks, that Christians have no respect for high art.
They see it as blasphemous and childish. Like Serrano’s Piss Christ, the art
world elevates these types of work, simply because they are shocking
and.offensive, without explanation of what these works are doing, what they
mean, etc. And she is highlighting the fact that any work that dared to do the
same things to Jewish iconography would cause an uproar. As a Jew, how would
you feel if the Torah was smeared with shit or the Star of David was pissed on?
Again, she is only trying to explain why art has no prestige in America and why
the art world is so keen on profaning religious imagery.

here's what serrano lately said about the work
(http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/29/nyregion/catholic-leader-turned-away-at-exhibit-he-deemed-offensive.html?ref=nyregion):

. . . he said, the work is about his personal love of Jesus, and
Jesus’s bodily torment on the cross, during which, Mr. Serrano believes, not
only blood, but all Jesus’s bodily fluids, including urine, spilled out.

“The thing that offends
me is that they characterize me as being an anti-Christian bigot,” he said,
“and that’s far from the truth. They are barking up the wrong tree when they
are saying I am not a Christian.”

i invited you to read my longer piece about paglia's take on the
sensation shows. in it i said that catholicism expresses itself brilliantly and
variously through (though not only through) visual media.

serrano was contending with his tradition, critiquing and personalizing
it through visual media. i've seen other work of his. he works with catholicism
— its beauty, hierarchy, distances, and power — visually. he does not, no
matter the media furor— to which paglia ever ready with her penchant for
demagoguery contributed — mean to abuse it. though, of course, he has every
right to abuse and disown it. to piss right on it, if he wants, which he
doesn't.

this is america. last i looked we hold the right to disavow
religion, well, sacred.

as jews often do judaism.

have you ever readphillip roth? do you have any idea of the hostility he engendered among
jews for "portnoy’s complaint"? the hatred? the death threats?

to (over) simplify: catholics have the benefit of a rich visual
tradition. jews (oversimplifying again) have worked more with text.

> As a Jew, how would you feel if the Torah was smeared with shit
. . .

as i sd in the piece i've referred to about paglia and the sensation
shows, the nazis did that. it didn't stop with torah scrolls. so sorry, it's a
ticklish subject. . .

nor am i talking about jews — or anybody else — walking into a
church and defiling religious imagery.

i thought we were talking about art.

karen bridson said she found a "good ten percent" of what
paglia writes "over-the-top", as opposed to the rest, which, to her,
"makes so much bloody sense." i'd reverse that ratio. i'd say 10
percent of what paglia wrote was timely, necessary, and brilliant. the other
ninety percent is boilerplate or foaming at the mouth. or silly, as in
concluding glittering images with "revenge of the sith."

There have been other writers critical of Paglia… Molly
Ivins wrote a witty review of Paglia’s first book back in 1990, in which Ivins
pointed out Paglia continual tendency to overgeneralize… I admire Paglia as an
interesting “character” who stimulates thought, even when one disagrees with
her… not taking her too seriously is probably the best way to enjoy her…

**

i can live with that assessment. problem is she encourages
all or nothing, turns too many readers into followers, disciples. she promotes
genuflection and surrender. it's all: camille has spoken. . . yeah, you're
right. if one must take her at all, it's best not too seriously.